This Is an Accepted Manuscript of an Article Published by Taylor

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in African and Black Diaspora on 11th September 2018, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17528631.2018.1516276 Unaccented Beat: Positional politics and the enigma of visibility in The Stuart Hall Project Hager Weslati In his essay film, The Stuart Hall Project, Akomfrah resumes his exploration of the multi-layered screen approach to political aesthetics, offering a complex portrait of his subject’s abiding concern with social inequality, tracking its manifestations in the ‘conjugated cultural realities’ of colonialism, post-colonialism and neo-colonialism down to its vanishing point in the ‘neo-liberal problem space’ of present-day Britain. Paying close attention to the use of associative editing, Vertovian color montage, and contrapuntal rhythmicity, this paper highlights the film’s critical take on the coalescence of multicultural drift, the slow moving glacier of feminism, and the paradigm of the diaspora into three-layered screens through which positional politics is redefined within the framework of Présence Africaine and the larger trajectory of contemporary African and diasporan artists, intellectuals, and activists. Keywords: Stuart Hall, John Akomfrah, Franz Fanon, essay film, color montage, rhythmicity, displacement, multiculturalism, sexual politics Neither the drawing nor the painting belongs to the in-itself any more than the image does. They are the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’ (1993 [1960], 126) ‘I Waited For You’ (1953) (Fuller, Gillespie, Trumpet solo transcription, Miles Davis) What exactly has Stuart Hall become the name of in contemporary thought? What do we think with when we cite fragments of his work? To paraphrase a question addressed to Jacques Derrida at the end of his life, how would Stuart Hall ‘respond to his life and his name?’ (Butler 2004, 32) Resuming the Unfinished Conversation (2012) started in his three-screen video installation piece, John Akomfrah’s essay-film The Stuart Hall Project (2013) is a glimpse into archival broadcast material, which introduced the face and voice of Stuart Hall to a generation of Black British young men and women as a media person and a public intellectual without prior knowledge of his academic work. This is not the case for a younger generation mostly familiar with textbook fragments from his writings on representation, ideology, ethnicity, diaspora or culture, in abstraction of the context in which these (shifting) paradigms have been conceptualized and arrived to. Stuart Hall once reproached Foucault with ‘saving for himself “the political”,’ while ‘denying himself “a politics”’ (Hall 1986, 49). The latter, he claimed, is situated in a ‘field of force’ which is yet to be ‘re-theorized in a radical way’ (50). Ironically, there is a widely held assumption that Stuart Hall’s life-long engagement with theorizing never materialized in any theory to his name. Akomfrah’s film is, I believe, a corrective to such hasty judgements and a significant contribution to re-orienting critical attention from the written to the (in) audible in the work of Stuart Hall, for whom the untranslatable in the rhythmicity of paradigmatic shifts or cultural drifts points at on-going conversations between notions of self and the world. Akomfrah’s approach to montage attunes the viewer (turned listener) to what Gramsci (1971, 383) describes as ‘the search for the leitmotif, the rhythm of thinking’ in Stuart Hall’s unfinished conversation with the history of the present. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s ‘The Intertwining—The Chiasmus’ (1959), Jessica Wiskus (2013, 120) explains that the structure of rhythm, which ‘binds the past and the present, subject and object,’ is nothing other than the silent ‘interval between articulated sounds [which] can be instituted only retroactively’ (9). This sound that articulates silence and the silence that articulates sound correspond to the theme of the untranslatable both in The Project and in its subject’s rhythm of thinking. Each sequence of the film counterpoints voiceover with still photographs and moving images, multiplying the intervals between them. Such an approach to montage is ‘meant to affect [the viewer] not only contextually, but also on an auditory 2 level’ (Petric 1978, 35). As such, the film’s cinematic aesthetics intersects Edward Said’s contrapuntal reading of the culture of imperialism with Dziga Vertov’s theory of intervals; the latter in particular resonates with the rhythmic composition of sequences into measured phrases whereby ‘each phrase has its rise, peak and decline’ (Vertov cited in Petric 1978, 35). Akomfrah’s film deepens the intervals between shots to intensify the encounter of metropolis and periphery, past and present, the private and the public. It creates what Vertov once described as ‘montage battle’ (cited in Petric 1978, 36). This paper explores two related layers of rhythmicity in the film, focusing, first, on the tuning of its color-themed montage to Stuart Hall’s rhythm of thinking following Blaudel’s (1980) three-fold temporality: the glacial, the social, and the ephemeral. Seen through the prism of Fanon’s ‘Fact of Blackness’ (1952), a second level of rhythmicity pertains to the film’s ambivalent take on multiculturalism, feminism, and sexual politics in the neoliberal ‘problem space’ of modern day Britain. Known to be the last intellectual refuge where Stuart Hall redefined the grounds of his political engagement at the end of his life (Hall & Back 2009), the film depicts, albeit in a silent way, ‘the paradigm of the diaspora’ as alternative positional politics against ‘the long march of […] a crisis which refuses to “fuse”’ (Hall 2011, 705). Blue-tinted montage: the lost sister and the Caribbean disease Signposted with intertitles, the thirteen chapters of the film reconstruct a chronological narrative of the life and career of Stuart Hall against the background of major political and cultural events that marked post-war Britain and international politics in the second half of the twentieth century. From the outset, the viewer is ushered into the maelstrom of the lived whose ambivalent grammatology evokes both the no longer is and a now. In the same way silence precedes the first note in a musical composition, the frozen portrait of Stuart Hall’s sister is the haunting moment of silence that marks the beginning of the film and the structuring element on which its rhythmicity rests. Rather than suggesting an inward leap into the private self and the distant blue-tinted coldness of the past, the framed portrait functions like a reflective surface, shifting its ‘bruising’ photographic punctums onto that which remains untranslated in an on- 3 going conversation between ‘our sense of who we are, what we feel entitled to, and what society makes available to us’ [01:52]. Already from the outset, social change and social inequality are given a human (black) face and the theme tune of Filles de Kilimanjaro. The ‘regret for the loss of a life which [one] might have lived but didn’t live and nostalgia for what cannot be’ [02:55] are by no means peculiar to one part of the world or to any ethnic group. Who knows, there may well be a lost sister in every family! More details of the ‘family tragedy’ emerge in the second chapter of the film, (From the Colony to the Post-Colony) attuned to Davis’s Chasing the Bird. Stuart Hall recalls the circumstances of his sister’s descent into depression after their mother refused to let her wed a black man ‘three shades darker than her.’ This episode confronted him with the concrete manifestations of ‘classic colonial tensions [which] were lived as part of [his] personal history’ (Hall 1996c, 486). By the time the still photograph of the lost sister appears in the film for the third time (chapter nine, In a Silent Way), it seems to have been detached from the private sphere of the family album to confront the viewer with a contagious sense of estrangement. ‘I don’t belong anywhere any longer,’ says Stuart Hall, ‘there is not one single thing that can now tell us who we are’ [59:11]. Something in the lost sister’s haunting apparitions resists signification and eludes representation; it remains too unbearable to articulate, impossible to translate, stuck between closeness and distance, intimacy with the past and estrangement from other possibilities and other lives. Ineffable desires silenced for all eternity cast their shadow over the entire film. The theme of the blurred ‘distinction between the public and the private self’ (Hall 1996c, 490) is resumed in the twelfth chapter of the film (Winds of Feminism, 1:19:24) at the end of a montage sequence where the photograph of the lost sister fades into images of pale, undernourished, ghostly portraits of workers on the breadline. Those images evoke the outcome of Thatcher’s two-front battle against the ‘enemy without’ and ‘the enemy within’. While she, literally, parked her tanks on the former’s lawn, in ‘some South Atlantic speck of land’ (Hall 2011, 713), she subdued the latter with her infamous shock treatment of the ‘British disease’. Without directly commenting on the aforementioned historical events in this sequence, Stuart Hall’s voice echoes in a slow montage of still photographic images of his children, as he reflects on the collapsed distinction between ‘the objective and the subjective’ in his thought. ‘Once you open those gates […] you are speaking as if you are allowing 4 something of a psychic energy to flow into the world’ [1:20:04]. The sequence concludes with a close low angle shot of a spaceship detached from its launch pad and shooting into space. The indistinguishable voices of astronauts are engulfed into the dense plume of bright orange flames spreading across the screen.

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